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Shakespeare, William |
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See also: Shakespeare's Plays (table) Shakespeare's Plays
LifeHis father, John Shakespeare, was successful in the leather business during Shakespeare's early childhood but later met with financial difficulties. During his prosperous years his father was also involved in municipal affairs, holding the offices of alderman and bailiff during the 1560s. While little is known of Shakespeare's boyhood, he probably attended the grammar school in Stratford, where he would have been educated in the classics, particularly Latin grammar and literature. Whatever the veracity of Ben Jonson's famous comment that Shakespeare had "small Latine, and less Greeke," much of his work clearly depends on a knowledge of Roman comedy, ancient history, and classical mythology. In 1582 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior and pregnant at the time of the marriage. They had three children: Susanna, born in 1583, and twins, Hamnet and Judith, born in 1585. Nothing is known of the period between the birth of the twins and Shakespeare's emergence as a playwright in London (c.1592). However, various suggestions have been made regarding this time, including those that he fled Stratford to avoid prosecution for stealing deer, that he joined a group of traveling players, and that he was a country schoolteacher. The last suggestion is given some credence by the academic style of his early plays; The Comedy of Errors, for example, is an adaptation of two plays by Plautus. In 1594 Shakespeare became an actor and playwright for the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company that later became the King's Men under James I. Until the end of his London career Shakespeare remained with the company; it is thought that as an actor he played old men's roles, such as the ghost in Hamlet and Old Adam in As You Like It. In 1596 he obtained a coat of arms, and by 1597 he was prosperous enough to buy New Place in Stratford, which later was the home of his retirement years. In 1599 he became a partner in the ownership of the Globe theatre, and in 1608 he was part owner of the Blackfriars theatre. Shakespeare retired and returned to Stratford c.1613. He undoubtedly enjoyed a comfortable living throughout his career and in retirement, although he was never a wealthy man. The PlaysChronology of CompositionThe chronology of Shakespeare's plays is uncertain, but a reasonable approximation of their order can be inferred from dates of publication, references in contemporary writings, allusions in the plays to contemporary events, thematic relationships, and metrical and stylistic comparisons. His first plays are believed to be the three parts of Henry VI; it is uncertain whether Part I was written before or after Parts II and III. Richard III is related to these plays and is usually grouped with them as the final part of a first tetralogy of historical plays. After these come The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus (almost a third of which may have been written by George Peele Peele, George, 1558?–1597?, English playwright, educated at Oxford. He experimented in a variety of forms, including the pageant, history, pastoral, comedy, and melodrama, but his best-known work is The Old Wives Tale After these early plays, and before his great tragedies, Shakespeare wrote Richard II, A Midsummer Night's Dream, King John, The Merchant of Venice, Parts I and II of Henry IV, Much Ado about Nothing, Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. The comedies of this period partake less of farce and more of idyllic romance, while the history plays successfully integrate political elements with individual characterization. Taken together, Richard II, each part of Henry IV, and Henry V form a second tetralogy of historical plays, although each can stand alone, and they are usually performed separately. The two parts of Henry IV feature Falstaff, a vividly depicted character who from the beginning has enjoyed immense popularity. The period of Shakespeare's great tragedies and the "problem plays" begins in 1600 with Hamlet. Following this are The Merry Wives of Windsor (written to meet Queen Elizabeth's request for another play including Falstaff, it is not thematically typical of the period), Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens (the last may have been partially written by Thomas Middleton Middleton, Thomas, 1580–1627, English dramatist, b. London, grad. Queen's College, Oxford, 1598. His early plays were chiefly written in collaboration with Dekker, Drayton, and others. On familial, state, and cosmic levels, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth present clear oppositions of order and chaos, good and evil, and spirituality and animality. Stylistically the plays of this period become increasingly compressed and symbolic. Through the portrayal of political leaders as tragic heroes, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra involve the study of politics and social history as well as the psychology of individuals. The last two plays in the Shakespearean corpus, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, may be collaborations with John Fletcher Fletcher, John, 1579–1625, English dramatist, b. Rye, Sussex, educated at Cambridge. A member of a prominent literary family, he began writing for the stage about 1606, first with Francis Beaumont, with whom his name is inseparably linked, later with Appeal and InfluenceSince his death Shakespeare's plays have been almost continually performed, in non-English-speaking nations as well as those where English is the native tongue; they are quoted more than the works of any other single author. The plays have been subject to ongoing examination and evaluation by critics attempting to explain their perennial appeal, which does not appear to derive from any set of profound or explicitly formulated ideas. Indeed, Shakespeare has sometimes been criticized for not consistently holding to any particular philosophy, religion, or ideology; for example, the subplot of A Midsummer Night's Dream includes a burlesque of the kind of tragic love that he idealizes in Romeo and Juliet. The strength of Shakespeare's plays lies in the absorbing stories they tell, in their wealth of complex characters, and in the eloquent speech—vivid, forceful, and at the same time lyric—that the playwright puts on his characters' lips. It has often been noted that Shakespeare's characters are neither wholly good nor wholly evil, and that it is their flawed, inconsistent nature that makes them memorable. Hamlet fascinates audiences with his ambivalence about revenge and the uncertainty over how much of his madness is feigned and how much genuine. Falstaff would not be beloved if, in addition to being genial, openhearted, and witty, he were not also boisterous, cowardly, and, ultimately, poignant. Finally, the plays are distinguished by an unparalleled use of language. Shakespeare had a tremendous vocabulary and a corresponding sensitivity to nuance, as well as a singular aptitude for coining neologisms and punning. Editions and SourcesThe first collected edition of Shakespeare is the First Folio, published in 1623 and including all the plays except Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen (the latter play also generally not appearing in modern editions). Eighteen of the plays exist in earlier quarto editions, eight of which are extremely corrupt, possibly having been reconstructed from an actor's memory. The first edition of Shakespeare to divide the plays into acts and scenes and to mark exits and entrances is that of Nicholas Rowe Rowe, Nicholas , 1674–1718, English dramatist. An ardent Whig, he was able to gain various government posts during the course of his life. In 1715 he became poet laureate. Among Shakespeare's most important sources, Raphael Holinshed Holinshed, Raphael , d. c.1580, English chronicler. He was a translator who also assisted Reginald Wolfe in the preparation of a universal history, which was never finished. The PoetryShakespeare's first published works were two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). In 1599 a volume of poetry entitled The Passionate Pilgrim was published and attributed entirely to Shakespeare. However, only five of the poems are definitely considered his, two appearing in other versions in the Sonnets and three in Love's Labour's Lost. A love elegy, The Phoenix and the Turtle, was published in 1601. Shakespeare's sonnets are by far his most important nondramatic poetry. They were first published in 1609, although many of them had certainly been circulated privately before this, and it is generally agreed that the poems were written sometime in the 1590s. Scholars have long debated the order of the poems and the degree of autobiographical content. The first 126 of the 154 sonnets are addressed to a young man whose identity has long intrigued scholars. The publisher, Thomas Thorpe, wrote a dedication to the first edition in which he claimed that a person with the initials W. H. had inspired the sonnets. Some have thought these letters to be the transposed initials of Henry Wriothesley, 3d earl of Southampton Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, 3d earl of , 1573–1624, English nobleman and patron of letters. Critical OpinionThere has been a great variety of critical approach to Shakespeare's work since his death. During the 17th and 18th cent., Shakespeare was both admired and condemned. Since then, much of the adverse criticism has not been considered relevant, although certain issues have continued to interest critics throughout the years. For instance, charges against his moral propriety were made by Samuel Johnson in the 18th cent. and by George Bernard Shaw in the 20th. Early criticism was directed primarily at questions of form. Shakespeare was criticized for mixing comedy and tragedy and failing to observe the unities of time and place prescribed by the rules of classical drama. Dryden Dryden, John, 1631–1700, English poet, dramatist, and critic, b. Northamptonshire, grad. Cambridge, 1654. He went to London about 1657 and first came to public notice with his Heroic Stanzas (1659), commemorating the death of Oliver Cromwell. Generally critics of the 17th and 18th cent. accused Shakespeare of a want of artistic restraint while praising him for a fecund imagination. Samuel Johnson, while agreeing with many earlier criticisms, defended Shakespeare on the question of classical rules. On the issue of unity of time and place he argued that no one considers the stage play to be real life anyway. Johnson inaugurated the criticism of Shakespeare's characters that reached its culmination in the late 19th cent. with the work of A. C. Bradley Bradley, Andrew Cecil, 1851–1935, English scholar and critic, b. Cheltenham; brother of Francis Herbert Bradley. He taught at Oxford for many years and was professor of poetry there (1901–6). While Schlegel and Coleridge were establishing Shakespeare's plays as artistic, organic unities, such 19th-century critics as the German Georg Gervinus and the Irishman Edward Dowden Dowden, Edward , 1843–1913, English critic, b. Ireland. He is best known as a Shakespearean scholar and as a biographer of Shelley (1886). The tendency in 20th-century criticism was to abandon both the study of character as independent personality and the assumption that moral considerations can be separated from their dramatic and aesthetic context. The plays were increasingly viewed in terms of the unity of image, metaphor, and tone. Caroline Spurgeon began the careful classification of Shakespeare's imagery, and although her attempts were later felt to be somewhat naive and morally biased, her work is a landmark in Shakespearean criticism. Other important trends in 20th-century criticism included the Freudian approach, such as Ernest Jones Jones, Ernest, 1879–1958, British psychoanalyst, b. Wales. He taught (1910–13) at the Univ. of Toronto and was director (1908–13) of the Ontario Clinic for Nervous Diseases. AuthorshipFor about 150 years after his death no one seemed to doubt that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him. However, in the latter part of the 18th cent. questions began to arise as to whether or not the historical William Shakespeare was indeed the author. Since then the issue has continued to be a subject of often heated debate, albeit mainly in academic circles. Those who doubt that Shakespeare wrote the works (sometimes called "anti-Stratfordians") generally assert that the actor from Stratford had a limited education; some have even claimed that he was illiterate. Many of the questioners maintain that such a provincial upstart could not have had the wide-ranging worldly and scholarly knowledge, linguistic skills, and fine sensibilities evinced by the author of the Shakespearean canon. Such qualities, they assert, could only have been possessed by a university-educated gentleman, multilingual, well-traveled, and quite possibly titled. Critics further contend that playwriting was a lowly profession at the time and that the "real" author protected his reputation by using Shakespeare's name as a pseudonym. Over the years, many other arguments, some involving secret codes, some even more abstruse, have been offered to cast doubt on Shakespeare's authorship. On the other hand, traditionalists ("Stratfordians") who believe that William Shakespeare was indeed the author of the plays and poems, point out that his probable education at the Stratford grammar school would have provided the required knowledge of the classics and classical civilization as well as of Latin and at least some Greek. They also maintain that what can be assumed to be his broad reading of historical sources along with his daily involvement in the lively worlds of Elizabethan London—artistic and intellectual, ordinary and aristocratic—would, when transmuted by his genius, have provided Shakespeare with the necessary background to create his dramatic and poetic works. Moreover, they say, Shakespeare was known to his contemporaries, as attested to by a number of extant references to him as a writer by other notable men of his time. Anti-Stratfordians have suggested a number of Elizabethans as candidates for the "real" author of the works. From the late 18th through the 19th cent. the individual most often cited was Francis Bacon Bacon, Francis, 1561–1626, English philosopher, essayist, and statesman, b. London, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at Gray's Inn. He was the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, lord keeper to Queen Elizabeth I. More than 50 other names have been put forward as the "real" Shakespeare, ranging from the implausible, e.g., Queen Elizabeth I, to the somewhat more possible, e.g., Christopher Marlowe Marlowe, Christopher, 1564–93, English dramatist and poet, b. Canterbury. Probably the greatest English dramatist before Shakespeare, Marlowe, a shoemaker's son, was educated at Cambridge and he went to London in 1587, where he became an actor and dramatist BibliographySee also biographies by E. K. Chambers (2 vol., 1930), G. E. Bentley (1961), S. Schoenbaum (1970 and 1975), S. Wells (1974), R. Fraser (2 vol., 1988), P. Levi (1988, repr. 1995), E. Sams (1995), P. Honan (1998), A. Holden (1999), I. L. Matus (1999), and P. Ackroyd (2005); A. Nicoll et al., ed., Shakespeare Survey (1948–) and, as author, Shakespeare: An Introduction (1952); G. Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare (1989); J. Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (1997); H. Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997); H. Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998); D. S. Kastan, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare (1999); S. Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions (2003); B. Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author (2003); S. Wells, Shakespeare for All Time (2003) and Shakespeare, Sex & Love (2010); S. Greenblatt, Will in the World (2004) and Shakespeare's Freedom (2010); J. Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005) and Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010); M. Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture (2008); J. Knapp, Shakespeare Only (2009); J. Bate, Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare (2009); C. Beauclerk, Shakespeare's Lost Kingdom (2010); T. Tanner, Prefaces to Shakespeare (2010); G. Wills, Verdi's Shakespeare (2011); G. Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (8 vol., 1957–75); O. J. Campbell and E. G. Quinn, ed., The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare (1966); M. R. Martin and R. C. Harrier, The Concise Encyclopedic Guide to Shakespeare (1972); M. Spevack, A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare (6 vol., 1970) and The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (1973); bibliographies ed. by G. R. Smith (1963), E. Quinn et al. (1973), and L. S. Champion (1986). Shakespeare, William Born Apr. 23, 1564, in Stratford-on-Avon; died there Apr. 23, 1616. English playwright and poet. Shakespeare’s father was John Shakespeare, an artisan and merchant. As a grammar school student, Shakespeare learned Latin and the fundamentals of ancient Greek. Beginning in the late 1580’s, he worked in London as an actor (until approximately 1603) and as a playwright. In 1594 he became a shareholder in the theatrical troupe called the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, which in 1603 was renamed The King’s Men. In approximately 1612, Shakespeare returned to Stratford. Because of the scarcity of biographical information, Shakespeare’s works have been attributed to others, including F. Bacon, the earls of Rutland and Oxford, and the playwright C. Marlowe. But careful study of the cultural life of the period and of Shakespeare’s work shows these hypotheses to be scientifically unfounded. As a poet, Shakespeare gained renown with his narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594), which were in the tradition of the philosophical poetry of the Renaissance. Between 1592 and 1600 he wrote 154 sonnets, which were published in 1609. They are apparently autobiographical in content, expressing the poet’s feelings toward a friend (sonnets 1–126) and toward his beloved (sonnets 127–152). The sonnets’ themes and motifs are typical of Renaissance poetry, but their more complex perception of life and man foreshadows Shakespeare’s dramatic work. The Shakespearean canon includes 37 plays, 18 of which were published in Shakespeare’s lifetime; 36 of the plays were in the first edition of his collected works, published in 1623 (only Pericles being excluded). Attempts to establish the chronology of Shakespeare’s works began in the second half of the 18th century. The following list of his plays indicates the year in which they were written and classifies them by period and genre according to the accepted practice in Shakespearean scholarship. First period (1590–94). Early chronicle plays: Henry VI, Part 2 (1590), Henry VI, Part 3 (1591), Henry VI, Part 1 (1592), and Richard III (1593). Early comedies: The Comedy of Errors (1592) and The Taming of the Shrew (1593). Early tragedy: Titus Andronicus (1594). Second period (1595–1600). Chronicle plays in the tragic vein: Richard II (1595) and King John (1596). Romantic comedies: The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594), Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1596), and The Merchant of Venice (1596). First mature tragedy: Romeo and Juliet (1595). Chronicle plays in the comic vein: Henry IV, Part 1 (1597), Henry TV, Part 2 (1598), and Henry V (1598). Comedies (representing Shakespeare’s mastery of the comic genre): Much Ado About Nothing (1598). The Merry Wives of Windsor (1598), As You Like It (1599), and Twelfth Night (1600). Third period (1600–08). Tragedies (representing a turning point in Shakespeare’s work): Julius Caesar (1599) and Hamlet (1601). “Bitter comedies,” or “problem plays”: Troilus and Cressida (1602), All’s Well That Ends Well (1603), and Measure for Measure (1604). Shakespeare’s tragic masterpieces: Othello (1604), King Lear (1605), and Macbeth (1606). Tragedies based on ancient history: Antony and Cleopatra (1607), Coriolanus (1607), and Timon of Athens (1608). Fourth period (1609–13). Romantic tragicomedies: Pericles (1609), Cymbeline (1610), The Winter’s Tale (1611), and The Tempest (1612). Late chronicle play: Henry VIII (1613), possibly written in collaboration with J. Fletcher. The following plays are not considered part of the Shakespearean canon: Edward III (1594–95), whose authorship is uncertain; Thomas More (1594–95; one scene); and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613), written with J. Fletcher. Some Shakespearean scholars, including A. A. Smirnov of the Soviet Union, divide Shakespeare’s work into three periods, combining the first and second periods (1590–1600). Shakespeare’s work incorporated all the major influences in the age of the Renaissance—both aesthetically, by synthesizing the traditions and motifs of popular romantic genres, Renaissance poetry and prose, folklore, and humanist and popular theater, and ideologically, by reflecting the entire edifice of contemporary thought, including traditional notions about the world order, defense of the patriarchal feudal system and of political centralization, Christian ethics, Renaissance Neoplatonism and Stoicism, sensualism, and Machiavellianism. This eclecticism, ranging over the full spectrum of life and human nature, was responsible for the all-encompassing vitality of Shakespeare’s work. His reality, however, was presented under different facets and in different lights at various stages of his creative development. The ideology of humanism, combined with popular ideals and aspirations, always remained the basis of Shakespeare’s plays. It is no coincidence that Shakespeare’s genius found its fullest expression in the theater, which by its very essence can convey life’s drama more successfully than other forms of art. The socioeconomic processes that brought about the cultural upheaval known as the Renaissance began later and developed more rapidly in England than they did on the Continent. The contradictions and contrasts that marked this period were sharper and more pressing in England; the signposts marking the development of humanist thought—the belief, followed by disbelief, in the imminent triumph of humanist ideals; the hope, followed by disillusion—were separated by centuries in Italy, for example, whereas in England they were part of the experience of a single generation. Shakespeare, better than anyone else, was able to grasp and expose the contradictions of his time; hence the dynamic and dramatic character of his works, filled with struggle and conflict. His profound understanding of contemporary trends was also a factor in his dynamic view of reality; this, together with his growing craftsmanship, defines the evolution of his work. The works of his first period show that even at this early stage Shakespeare was acutely sensitive to the comic and tragic absurdities of life, although he depicted them in a largely traditional manner, presenting the tragic as dreadful and the comic as farcical—the one being isolated from the other. Shakespeare was still learning, attempting to master both the national tradition of Marlowe’s “bloody tragedy” and the European tradition in general; his work was based on ancient models—on Plautus in the case of The Comedy of Errors, on Seneca in Titus Andronicus, and on Italian humanist comedy in The Taming of the Shrew. Shakespeare’s humanist position, too, was still to assume definite form. The positive heroes of the chronicle plays gravitate toward antiquity, and the comedies are clearly influenced by patriarchal morality. The dramatic nature of life remains the basis of Shakespeare’s work during his second creative period. The general tone and the endings of his plays testify to his faith in the harmonious resolution of life’s contradictions. The ambience of these works is defined by characters who uphold harmony in government and in social a |